Should Taxpayers Bailout Newspapers?

Without newspapers I would have no memories of sitting on my grandmother’s lap learning how to read. I wouldn’t have had one of the most interesting careers on the planet nor a way of finding out what’s really going on in the world.

I have spent all of my adult life in the business, so it would be dishonest of me to say that I wasn’t heartened to read President Obama’s words about journalism and that he would consider bailing out newspapers.

But the side of me with “bailout fatigue” has to wonder if saving newspapers is the best use of taxpayers’ money.

Declining readership, dwindling advertising dollars and the growing popularity of Web sites and cable news shows have all put enormous financial pressures on newspapers, which threatens the industry’s survival — and some newspapers have already gone under .

With more and more Americans turning to YouTube or “The Daily Show” for news these days, bailing out newspapers probably isn’t one of the soundest investments to make right now.

In praising newspaper journalism, Obama added: “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.”

The president’s worries underscore the findings in a Pew Research Center survey released this month that shows public assessment about the accuracy and independence of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades.

Just days after Obama made his comments about a bailout, Congress held a hearing on the future of newspapers.

The hearing, coincidentally, came on the very same day the parent company of the publication you’re reading right now laid off 44 workers.

“ . . .  the government can help foster solutions for this industry in ways which protect the independence of newspapers and enables their objective reporting to thrive in a new economic and media climate,” said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney , D-N.Y., who chaired the Sept. 24 hearing. Maloney has also introduced legislation she says will enable local newspapers to take advantage of nonprofit status as a way to preserve their place in communities nationwide.

If attendance at the hearing is an indication for how much appetite members of Congress have for saving newspapers, then the industry just might be doomed. Only three of the 20 House and Senate members showed up for it, and the Democratic chairman left early to vote on a House bill, putting the ranking Republican in charge, The Washington Times reported.

Since the days of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Fathers insisted on a free press.

“[It] would be quite as significant to declare that government ought to be free, that taxes ought not to be excessive, etc., as that the liberty of the press ought not to be restrained,” Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers, No. 84.

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General Motors Bans Michael Moore From Detroit Premiere Of His Own Movie

Michael Moore’s next documentary is “Capitalism: A Love Story,” a film which attacks the U.S. economic system as fundamentally unjust and declares, “Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil. You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.”

Although the movie is not set to open nationwide until Oct. 2, Moore has been premiering a number of sneak preview screenings for Detroit residents in his home state of Michigan. But, as Michigan Live reports, Moore ran into problems when it turned out one of the theaters he rented for the screenings was owned by General Motors (GM) — which Moore famously skewered for its anti-worker policies in his 1989 film Roger & Me.

GM agreed to run the movie only if both Moore and the local press were locked out. Essentially, GM banned Moore from his own screening. A local Detroit news station interviewed Moore about the incident. He said GM should “get over” its grudge against him and be more accountable to citizens, especially in light of the billions of dollars the government has loaned it:

MOORE: General Motors said that I could not be on the premises doing any interviews or press. … I would get over it if I were them. … In the movie I actually try to attempt to see the new chairman to share my ideas about mass transit and other things that the General Motors factories could be building that would benefit about society. … We have 50 billion dollars of our money sitting over there. That is owned by us now. And the de facto CEO is President Barack Obama. I legally rented the four theaters to have my Detroit premiere, and yet somehow they’re able to ban me from my own premiere here? What country are we living in?

Watch it:

In addition to the over 1,000 theater opening Oct. 2, Moore plans to screen the film for free on Oct. 1 in the some of the poorest parts of the country.

Michael Moore: Newspapers 'Slit Their Own Throats'

It’s not the Internet that has killed newspapers, Filmmaker Michael Moore said in a four-minute detour from talking about his new movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story.”

Instead, he said, it’s corporate greed. “These newspapers have slit their own throats,” he said. “Good riddance.”

Moore said that newspapers, bought up by corporations in the last generation, have pursued profits at the expense of news gathering. By basing their businesses on advertising over circulation, newspaper owners have neglected their true economic base and core constituency, he said.

He also accused those corporations of supporting Republican candidates, which have discouraged reading and education in measures such as supporting the elimination of the Education Department at the federal level.

And Moore cited newspapers like those in Baltimore or Detroit, his home town, with firing reporters that cover subjects that affect the community.

Ultimately, he said, this was self-defeating. It would be like GM deciding to discourage people from learning how to drive, he said.

“It’s their own greed, their own stupidity,” he said. “It’s capitalism that taken (newspapers) from us.”

Moore said he tried to include the subject in his new film, but it became too large a topic and instead he may make an entire film about the fall of newspapers.

“One year or two years from now,” he predicted, “we are not going to have daily newspapers.”

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On this day in 1946: Animal Farm published in U.S.

Start:	Aug 26, '09
Location:	United States

Originally published in England a year earlier, George Orwell's Animal Farm reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II.

The novel addresses not only the corruption of the revolution by its leaders but also how wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia destroy any possibility of Utopia. While the novel portrays corrupt leadership as the flaw in revolution (and not the act of revolution itself), it also shows how potential ignorance and indifference to problems within a revolution could allow horrors to happen if smooth transition to a people's government isn't satisfied.

Time Magazine chose the book as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005); it also places at number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996 and is also included in the Great Books of the Western World.